Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

Chapter 12

The Power of a Revenue Cycle Process

Okay, you’ve decided to take the plunge and transform your traditional marketing and sales activities into a continuously improving, higher-performing revenue machine. Where do you start? The first step along that journey is to understand the different process components that go into creating revenue—what I will refer to here as the revenue cycle.1

If I had used the term “sales cycle,” most people would have a pretty clear picture of what I was talking about. The sales cycle represents the steps involved, and time required, for a salesperson to close a deal. Most business leaders would say that a sales cycle runs from the moment a salesperson begins to talk to a prospective buyer, to the day he or she finally closes the deal. Sales cycles are usually divided up into phases or steps often called “pipeline stages,” each of which has its own definition. Sales leaders use those definitions to assist in sales forecasting and deal management. There’s a whole body of literature, as well as a bunch of sales methodologies, which have grown up around the concept of the sales cycle and pipeline stage management.

Most C-level executives spend an inordinate amount of time thinking and talking about sales cycles and how they impact their sales pipelines. No doubt these discussions help, to some extent, with improving sales effectiveness and forecast accuracy. But it’s really difficult to think about any of these sales cycle methodologies as being ...